Q&A;: Paul Gross
The Canadian heartthrob romances Kim Cattrall in Private Lives.
Mon Nov 14 2011
Photograph: Hugh Glendinning
Paul Gross pops a Fisherman's Friend after settling into an armchair in the Paramount Hotel's upstairs lounge. A celebrated homegrown talent in Canada, the charismatic actor-writer-director-producer (not to mention singer-songwriter) is making his Broadway debut in Nol Coward's amorous 1930 wrestling match, Private Lives, costarring with Sex and the City's Kim Cattrall. In British director Richard Eyre's combustible revival, they play Amanda and Elyot, a divorced couple who reignite while honeymooning with new spouses. Gross, 52, is known in this country for TV roles on Due South and quirky Canadian series Slings and Arrows, about a struggling Shakespeare festival, but lately he's been writing and directing films. His last stage role? Hamlet at Canada's Stratford Festival in 2000.
How did Private Lives lure you back to the stage?
It's peculiar. It wasn't on my radar to do a play, and I was somewhat colored by having seen a production years ago that was very good but didn't connect with me. It seemed distant from our own time. But Richard's whole thrust was to see the play as if it were brand-new and not be colored by history. It's a little ballsier, a little rougher, and he's pulled out the darker insinuations. Yet it's still Coward. What's very nice to play is what Coward was really writing about. He's a very acute observer of human sexuality and the extraordinary thing that happens to some people for whom the initial pull is so great that when they're in each other's orbit they're clamped together, but as soon as they get together, it's warfare. He's a better playwright than perhaps he even knew. I don't mean he's quite on the level of Chekhov, but we went through a long period of rediscovering Chekhov: It's not quite so depressing, some of it is hilarious.
Coward has more substance than we might realize?
It's a similar rediscovery, because a lot of what he was writing about is timeless. These two characters recognize the silhouettes they're supposed to fill out, but they don't care about the interior. One of the most attractive things with Elyot is he has an anarchist streak. He knows how to talk, look, sound perfect for the class and time, but he doesn't give a shit about it.
An upper-class anarchist?
Certainly not a Weatherman, but he'd be interesting in the House of Lords. [Laughs] He has the capacity to see certain truths—even if he can't see them about himself.
Has returning to the stage been challenging?
It took a while to get that muscle back, but I love it. It's so easy to forget what you love about something if you're busy with other things. I also got sick partway through the Toronto run. I had bronchitis and blew my voice out, which was shocking. I missed four shows, and I'd never felt so guilty. People are paying prices to see these shows that make me swallow my wisdom teeth.
Any chance we'll get a fourth season of Slings and Arrows?
The creators often talk about it, 'cause it's such a lovely, surprisingly successful show. When I first talked to Richard Eyre [about Private Lives], I asked him, "Why would you think of me?" He said, "I love Slings and Arrows."
After Private Lives, you're going to Afghanistan to direct a movie, Hyena Road.
I've been over already and shot a lot of scenery and stuff in a war zone, and now I need to get some actors inside—but not right in the heart of the war zone. It's a rough neighborhood, and it's pretty hard to say to actors, "We're gonna go to a place where as soon as you do this, you're a target."
What else will you be doing while you're in New York?
The plan is to go to galleries, which is one of my favorite things to do. My daughter's actually gonna be my roommate for fall. We'll see how that goes. She's in her final year at NYU.
You wrote some plays in the '80s. Will you ever return to that?
I think I will, eventually. I stopped because they got bigger, and nobody could afford to do a play with 12 characters. It also coincided with someone approaching me to write a movie of the week. The money they were prepared to give me, I was like, Wow, I could get out of that horrible basement apartment. Private Lives has reminded me how extraordinary plays are. No other experience has that capacity to pull us all together in a commonly creative experience.
Private Lives is playing at the Music Box Theatre.
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